How do you feel about Enrage timers?

Personally, I understand the need for enrage timers, but I absolutely despise the current, lazy, method they are implemented with. Without some sort of enrage almost any fight would be beatable with just 20 healers, 2 tanks, and a couple of ranged dps (to handle odd mechanics). This would get quite boring fast. However the idea of just throwing a timer on each fight where the boss suddenly gets insanely strong and starts to one-shot everyone (often with some sort of aoe) just seems uninventive and forced. Why can't bosses do things like gradually get stronger like Gruul, constantly summon a constantly increasing amount of adds that can't be just instantly aoe killed, keep some with the current enrage format but do something small like have a random npc run out or even just throw the enemy that new weapon they were waiting for to explain the increased power, etc.

Yes, this would increase the work load on Blizzard. However, it shouldn't be much considering nothing I have proposed calls for new models.

Some bosses do exactly that. It is typically called a 'soft enrage.' Not all boss encounters can be designed with a soft enrage in mind, and as such it is not appropriate for every boss to have a soft enrage.

Some bosses do exactly that. It is typically called a 'soft enrage.' Not all boss encounters can be designed with a soft enrage in mind, and as such it is not appropriate for every boss to have a soft enrage.

Generally the term soft enrage, applies towards things such as a boss getting stronger at 10%, or done after a set time, with very little reason. As far as not every boss being appropriate to have this, I agree, however I do believe that most could be easily designed to have some form.

Plenty of bosses incorporate soft enrages, even soft enrages as early as the start of the fight.

Fights with adds spawning continuously. If the adds aren't low by the time the next ones come in then you're going to have an increasing number of adds until you can't cope any more.

Some fights have in built DPS checks in a certain way at a certain time. Ragnaros had a few of these. You had to be able to kill the sons of flame in the transition, you had to be able to kill the molten elementals before they killed you, you had to be able to get him through phase 3 before he spawned too many meteors, and you had to kill him before you ran out of room in phase 4. Spine of Deathwing was another. If you couldn't kill the tendons in time you couldn't kill him.
Other fights have things like phase 1 of Lei Shen, where if you haven't got him to transition after a full tour of the room then either the high level pylon abilities will kill you or the damage from moving him between platforms will.

Recently there have been plenty of fights with mini-DPS checks in built into the encounter in a way that would stop you stacking healers. In fact in many fights over the years it has been more beneficial to take fewer healers and more DPS as it has resulted in a big reduction in the amount of damage that the raids takes.

Lei Shen also had a get more powerful over time thing in his final phase, which would kill the raid well before an enrage was near.

Hard enrages just serve to stop you from stacking healers in fights where it wouldn't make sense to have a soft enrage or a mini-DPS check.
I know hard enrages do seem like a very common thing, but a lot of fights that have them you won't actually see it unless half your raid dies.

Much the same as you say it feels lazy if the majority of fights employed a different method that other method would feel lazy.

There's only really so many ways to stop people taking half a raid of healers. Hard enrages are the only one that is independent of encounter design, and as such can be put on any fight to make sure you take a certain number of DPS and don't trivialise the fight by massively overhealing it.

Soft enrage timers are good for some bosses but not all because of the amount of tuning that would be needed.
Some bosses are good with a soft enrage while others its just BAM, you didn't have the dps so you fail.
I don't see anything wrong with this design. If anything some bosses need shorter enrage timers imho, maybe even emrage timers that scale to the ilevel of your dps oh would that be fun!!!! See if your dps really are worth their ilevel they carry.

If anything some bosses need shorter enrage timers imho, maybe even emrage timers that scale to the ilevel of your dps oh would that be fun!!!! See if your dps really are worth their ilevel they carry.

I could see this sort of idea maybe working on a mythic only boss, except with the players getting their gear scaled rather than the boss changing because it's a bit simpler and the tech already exists.

Outside mythic I think the tuning would be an issue. Without gear acting as a natural nerf to the content you are asking everyone who faces the encounter to perform as well as people did in the world first kill. For a few guilds this would be pretty cool, but I don't think it's for everyone.

I prefer "enrages" like Dark Aniumus' Full Power to flat out wipe mechanics like Gara'jal or Norushen. I understand the importance of enrage timers, but it's positively soul crushing when you're working on an encounter and the enrage simply snuffs out any possibility for recovery. A mechanic that allows you to keep swinging on the boss while greatly increasing the overall difficulty of the encounter is far more interesting, imo. I also like encounters which because increasingly more difficult the longer you let the encounter progress (H-Garrosh P3 is a good example); while not punishing in that you wipe immediately if you don't miss a certain DPS check, it gives you a reason to want to play better to avoid the potential for wiping.

Enrages are fine as is, there's a good bit of variety to them. Some are hard enrages that insta wipe you, some are like Nazgrim and you can kite him around for close to a full minute before he actually kills you (actually what the very best guilds had to do on H Baleroc before he was nerfed, kite him around for 45+ seconds after his enrage).

They are absolutely required. There would be nothing to detriment guilds from significantly overhealing fights if there was no enrage timers of some sort.

I agree with there being a variety of enrage mechanics/styles because they do tend to lead to different approaches to boss encounters. Hard enrages tend to be more of a pure DPS check, putting strain on healers (usually use less) and DPS to play optimally, whereas soft enrages do allow some flexibility as to your approach on how to handle the boss when the shit starts to hit the fan.

I design encounters myself, and I must be honest I try to make the "enrage/berserk" timers seem as natural as possible. There's something that just doesn't sit right with me when a boss can suddenly go crazy and kill everyone after X minutes - if it has the ability to do that, then why not do it when the players engage it and not even have a fight? If Malkorok really wanted to defend the Warchief, wouldn't he do that straight away instead of waiting 6 minutes?

Some of them make some sense, at least. Norushen for example - he's testing you against the Amalgam of Corruption and if you're in there too long he purges the containment zone to destroy both you and it, just to be safe.

As an example of what kind of berserk timers feel more natural, in one encounter I designed you have to destroy a big machine that churns out elemental spirits (not gonna go into details), and the machine periodically zaps players throughout the fight as one of the mechanics. It has an Instability meter and it becomes more unstable every time it zaps players; then once it reaches maximum Instability it Overloads and starts churning out spirits much faster and zapping players much faster, giving you very little time to finish it off. It feels more natural than "LOL u all ded now cuz I sed so" after some time.

Generally the term soft enrage, applies towards things such as a boss getting stronger at 10%, or done after a set time, with very little reason.

Nope it does not.
Soft enrage is the process of the encounter becomming more difficult over the time of the encounter, until a point where your raid can no longer overcome the challenge: be it adds, AoE pulse damage, tank damage and so on.

Nope it does not.
Soft enrage is the process of the encounter becomming more difficult over the time of the encounter, until a point where your raid can no longer overcome the challenge: be it adds, AoE pulse damage, tank damage and so on.

I agree that it's not right, but wowpedia is hardly a valid source on the definition of specific terms.

It's fine as it is. A mix of hard enrages and soft enrages are interesting. Also they are needed to make sure people actually bring dps.

Actually many of the MoP bosses had way more berserks then the 1000% dmg increase one

To give you a few examples

Durumu one shots the raid via Obliterate.
Dark Animus goes FULL POWER at 100 energy
Lei Shen has the winds to act as a soft berserk
Ra-den has his orbs and the damage increase
Norushen will just blow the raid up and will Malkorok&Spoils
Sha's berserk is actually Pride
Siegecrafter is actually pretty funny. When the time comes, he summons Deathdealer lasers that wipe the raid
Garrosh has many soft berserks: the p1 adds, the stacking debuff at 100 energy, running out of rooms with the weapons, etc

You need to understand that the point of berserks is to wipe the raid...FAST. Stuff like "gradually get stronger" usually backfires.

If he can enrage.. why not do it instantly? And nuke us from orbit, Enrage timers dosen't really make sense imo

If you aren't intentionally idiotic about it they make sense. They need to make RP reasons for these zerk timers, not just have the boss scream "LOL" and *splat* you when the pull timer reaches zero.

Hard enrages like Noru stop you stacking healers because of one shot mechanics after x time. Soft enrages enforce certain dps checks on you to stop you falling behind (Garrosh). How else could they design encounters?

If he can enrage.. why not do it instantly? And nuke us from orbit, Enrage timers dosen't really make sense imo

Neither does the fact that every boss just sits there and waits for us to attack after wipes, so lets not argue that there are some flaws in logic, because there has to be in order for the game to actually be a game.

OT: What you are asking for is more work, period. By your logic why aren't there NPC's running around the world 24/7 delivering mail? There are things that just aren't worth being implemented into the game.